The report from Russia printed in this issue under the
heading of “News from the Intellectuals”, deserves the particular
attention of the reader. Just before our paper appeared, we received
confirmation of the facts about which our correspondent writes, and must
dwell on them in greater detail.

A new political organisation is coming into existence. The social
movement is taking a new turn. There is a grouping of elements among the
bourgeois democrats who want to be “more left than the Cadets”, and who
are attracting Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries. It seems as though
some dim realisation is breaking through that the Cadet opposition in the
Third Duma is a decaying corpse, and that “something must be done” apart
from it.

Such are the facts. They are anything but conspicuously definite as
yet, but they already anticipate events that are understandable and
inevitable from the standpoint of the lessons provided by the first three
years of the revolution.

The Cadets of the first generation appeared on the open stage of the
revolution in the spring of 1905. They have managed during this period of
nearly three years to fade without ever having blossomed. Now they are
being replaced by Cadets of the second generation. What is the meaning of
this generation, and with what problems does it face the workers’ party?

The Cadets of the first generation made a noise at their banquets in
1904, carried on the
Zemstvo campaign,[1] and expressed the beginnings of the social upswing
at a time when relations between the various classes and the
autocracy, and among themselves, were still quite undetermined, i.e., up to
the time when the open struggle of the masses and the policy of classes,
not of little groups, deter mined those relations. The Cadets at that time
grouped together all sorts of elements in bourgeois, so-called educated
society, beginning with the landlord who was not so keen on a constitution
as he was on getting a slice of cake for himself, and ending with the
working, salaried intellectuals. The Cadets were preparing to act as
mediators between the “historic authorities”, i.e., the tsarist
autocracy, and the struggling masses of the working class and the
peasantry. The deputation to the tsar in the summer of 1905 was the
beginning of this toadyism—for the Russian-liberals understand no other
form of mediation than toadyism. And since then there has literally not
been a single, at all important, stage of the Russian revolution when the
bourgeois liberals did not “mediate” by the same method of toadying to
the autocracy and to the servants of the Black-Hundred landlord clique. In
August 1905 they opposed the revolutionary tactics of boycotting the
Bulygin Duma. In October 1905 they formed the openly counter-revolutionary
party of the Octobrists, while at the same time sending Pyotr Struve into
Witte’s ante-room and preaching moderation and accurate behaviour. In
November 1905 they condemned the post and telegraph workers’ strike and
voiced their condolences at the “horrors” of the soldiers’ revolts. In
December 1905 they fearfully stuck close to
Dubasov,[2] in order next day to hit out against (perhaps one ought to
say, to take a kick at) “the madness”. At the beginning of 1906 they
hotly defended themselves against the “shameful” suspicion that they were
capable of campaigning abroad against the 1,000-million ruble loan to
strength en the autocracy. In the First Duma the liberals mouthed phrases
about the people’s freedom, while on the sly they ran to
Trepov’s backdoor and fought the Trudoviks and the workers’
deputies. By the
Vyborg Manifesto[3] they sought to kill two birds with one stone,
manoeuvring in such a way that their behaviour could be interpreted, as the
occasion required, either in the spirit of support of the revolution or in
the spirit of fighting the revolution. Needless to speak of the Second and
Third Dumas, where
the liberalism of the Cadets stood revealed in its true Octobrist colours.

During these three years the Cadets have done their job so thoroughly
that attempts at a new revival are linked from the very outset with the
slogan “more left than the Cadets"! The Cadets of the first generation
have made themselves impossible. They have buried themselves by
their continuous betrayal of the people’s freedom.

But are not the Cadets of the second generation, who are replacing
those of the first, infected with the same poison of putrefaction? Are not
the “Social-Cadets”, the Popular Socialist gentry, who are making a
particular fuss around the new organisation, intending to repeat the old
evolution of which we have had three years’ experience?

One has to answer this question not with guesses about the future but
by analysis of the past. And this analysis irrefutably shows that the
“Socialist-Revolutionary Mensheviks”, the Popular Socialist gentry,
really did play the part of Cadets in that Trudovik, peasant political
organisation—or to be more accurate, political movement—in which they
were functioning in their “heydays”, for example in the period of the
First Duma. Remember the main facts in the history of the “party”
(group?) of Popular Socialists in the Russian revolution. They received
their baptism in the
Osvobozhdeniye League.[4] At the congress of the S.R. party in
December 1905 they, wavering eternally between the Cadets and the S.R.s,
took a stupid middle-of-the road stand, wishing to be both together with
and separate from the Socialist-Revolutionaries. During the period of
liberties in October they ran their political newspapers in a bloc with the
S.R.s. And the same in the period of the First Duma —"high”
diplomacy, “skilful” concealment of differences from the eyes of the
world! After the dissolution of the First Duma, after the failure of the
second wave of insurrections, after the suppression of the
Sveaborg rising,[5] these gentlemen take their decision—to
turn to the right. They “legalise” their party, for no other purpose,
naturally, than to denounce the idea of insurrection quite legally in the
press, and to prove the untimeliness of active republican propaganda. In
face of the peasant deputies in the First Duma they win a
victory over the Socialist-Revolutionaries, collecting 104 signatures to
their
Land Bill[6] as against the 33 for the
S.R. Bill.[7] The “sober” bourgeois aspirations of the peasant small
proprietor for nationalisation of the land get the upper hand over the
vagueness of “socialisation”. Instead of striving for the political and
revolutionary organisation of the peasants, organisation for insurrection,
we see the Social-Cadets striving to play at legality and parliamentarism,
striving towards the parochialism of the intellectualist circles. The
wavering of the Russian peasant between the Cadet arid the intellectualist
Popular Socialist opportunist on the one hand, and the intellectually
unsteadfast revolutionary S.R. on the other, reflects the dual position of
the petty tiller of the soil, his incapacity for conducting a consistent
class struggle without guidance by the proletariat.

And if today the Popular Socialist gentlemen are once again beginning
their “affair” with the Left Cadets, dragging in their wake the
slow-witted Mensheviks and S.R.s, this means that the whole lot of them
have learned nothing during the three years of the revolution. They say
that economic demands lead to disunity. They want to unite on the basis of
more immediate demands—political demands. They have understood absolutely
nothing in the course of the revolution, which in Russia, as in other
countries, has demonstrated that only the mass struggle is strong, and that
such a struggle can develop only in the name of serious economic changes.

That the Mensheviks and the S.R.s keep trailing after the Left Cadets
is no news. This happened at the elections to the Second Duma in
St. Petersburg. This happened on the question of a Cadet Ministry and a
Duma with full powers, with some of them, and on the question of a secret
bloc with the Popular Socialists with others. There are evidently profound
reasons which rouse among the petty-bourgeois intellectuals “a passion
akin to sickness”, a passion for coming under the wing of the liberal
bourgeoisie.

They cover up this passion, of course, in the usual way— with
speeches about making use of the revival, or new grouping of forces, and so
forth.

To be sure, gentlemen, we also stand for making use... of a corpse—
only not for its “revival”, but to fertilise the
soil with it; not to encourage rotten theories and philistine moods, but
that it may play the part of "devil’s advocate”. We shall use
this new, good, excellent example of the Popular Socialists and the Left
Cadets to teach the people, to teach them what not to do, and how to avoid
Cadet treachery and petty-bourgeois flabbiness. We shall closely follow the
growth and development of this new little freak (if it is not still-born),
hourly reminding people that every such foetus, if net still-born,
inevitably and unavoidably signifies in present-day Russia the heralding of
the mass struggle of the working class and the peasantry. The
Osvobozhdeniye League is being reborn. If that is so, it means
that the people at the top are beginning to anticipate something: and if
that is so, it means that after the beginning will come the continuation,
after the fussing of the intellectuals will come the proletarian struggle.

And it is the lessons of struggle, the lessons of revolutionary
alignment only in struggle and only with the peasant masses fighting for
revolution, that we shall teach the people, in connection with the
appearance on the stage of the Cadets of the second generation.

Notes

[1]The Zemstvo campaign was conducted by bourgeois liberals,
members of the Zemstvos, between the autumn of 1904 and January 1905. The
campaign consisted of a series of conferences, public meetings and banquets
at which speeches were made and resolutions passed in support of moderate
constitutional demands.

[2]Dubasov, F. V.—Governor-General of Moscow who crushed the
armed uprising of December 1905.

[3]The Vyborg Manifesto or “the Vyborg Appeal” was issued by
members of the First Duma “To the people from the people’s
representatives”. It was adopted on July 9-10 (22-23), 1906, at a meeting
in Vyborg at which about 200 deputies, most of them Cadets, assembled after
the dissolution of the First Duma. The appeal called upon the people to
offer “passive resistance” to the government by refusing to pay taxes and
furnish recruits until the tsar had announced new elections to the Duma. In
September 1906 the Congress of the Cadet Party openly admitted that the use
of “passive resistance” was “impracticable”.

[4]Osvobozhdeniye League— a liberal-monarchist organisation
founded abroad by P. Struve in 1904. The Osvobozhdeniye people
were supporters of a constitutional monarchy and endeavoured to strike a
bargain with the tsarist government, concealing their struggle against the
revolution under the false guise of democracy. Eventually they formed the
core of the Cadet Party.

[5]The rising in the Sveaborg fortress (near Helsingfors), which
started during the night of July 17-18 (30-31), 1906 broke out
spontaneously and prematurely, being largely provoked by the
Socialist-Revolutionaries. On receiving information about the situation in
Sveaborg and the possibility of an armed uprising ,the St. Petersburg
Commit tee of the R.S.D.L.P. decided on the urgent dispatch of a delegation
to Sveaborg authorised to secure a postponement of the action or, if this
could not be achieved, to take the most active p a r.t in leading the
uprising. The text of the decision was written b V. I. Lenin. Finding it
impossible to prevent spontaneous action,
the Bolsheviks headed the uprising. Its leaders were lieutenants
A. P. Yemelyanov and Y. L. Kokhansky, members of the military organisation
of the R.S.D.L.P. Seven of the ten artillery companies took an active part
in the uprising. The insurgents put forward the slogans of overthrow of the
autocracy, freedom for the people, and the transfer of the land to the
peasants. The working class in Finland gave active support to the
insurgents. On July 18 (31) a general strike was declared in Helsingfors,
which eventually spread to other towns. The uprising lasted three days, but
the general lack of preparation had its effect, and on July 20 (August 2),
after the fortress a been subjected to a naval bombardment, the Sveaborg
rising was crushed. Its participants were court-martialled, forty-three men
being executed and some hundreds sentenced to penal servitude or
imprisonment.

[6]The Land Bill of the 104 members of the Puma was introduced by
the Trudoviks at the 13th session of the Duma on May 23 (June 5), 1906. The
Bill made it the object of land legislation “to work towards the
establishment of a system under which all the land with its mineral wealth
and waters would belong to the whole people, the land needed for
agriculture to be given over only to the use of those who cultivate it with
their own labour” (The Duma in Russia. Documents & Materials,
Russ. ed., Moscow, 1957, p. 172). For this purpose the demand was put
forward for creating “a national distributable land fund” consisting of
all state, crown, monastery and church lands. Landed estates and other
privately-owned lands were to be forcibly alienated to this fund where the
size of the respective holdings exceeded the labour standard established
for the given locality. Certain compensation was allowed for alienated
privately-owned lands. Allotment lands and small private holdings were to
be retained for a time by their owners. The Bill also provided for the
eventual gradual transfer of these lands to the national fund. The agrarian
reform was to be carried out by local committees elected by democratic
vote. These demands expressed the interests of the well-to-do peasants, who
feared immediate and complete abolition of private ownership of the land
and stood for compensation for alienated lands. Lenin remarked that the
Bill of the 104 “is permeated with the small proprietor’s fear of
being too radical, of drawing too large a mass of poor people into the
movement” (see present edition, Vol. 11, p. 469). Despite its inconsistent
and utopian character, the “Bill of the 104", as Lenin pointed out, was a
platform of struggle for converting the well-to-do section of the enslaved
peasantry into free farmers.

[7]Lenin has in mind the “Draft of the Fundamental Land Law”
signed by 33 deputies (mostly Trudoviks) of the First Duma. This Bill was
drafted with the help of the Socialist-Revolutionaries and expressed their
views on agrarian question. The “Bill of the 33” demanded the immediate
and complete abolition of private land ownership and proclaimed the equal
right of all citizens to use the land and the principle of communal land
tenure with equalised
reallotment on the basis of subsistence and labour norms. In comparison
with other Bills of the Trudoviks, the “Bill of the 33” was more drastic
in that it demanded the immediate abolition of private landownership and
confiscation of the landed estates with out compensation.

Introduced into the Duma on June 6 (19), 1906, the “Bill of the 33”
met with furious resistance on the part of the Cadets and was rejected by
140 votes to 78.